LeeNukes

OK, so for the first time I found I was having problems purchasing a game in Steam using my wine setup.

I’ve only just got the sound back in Team Fortress 2, and now this?!

Well, I’ve got a solution for you. The problem appears to be with the Wine implementation of iexplorer. The issue is you can click on the purchase button as often as you like, but it won’t take you to anywhere.

I’m running wine 1.1.5 and Fedora 10 Beta

My solution is thus:

Using your web browser in Linux (outside of wine) goto the Steam page and goto http://store.steampowered.com

Navigate to the game you wish to purchase and click on purchase, for example I’m buying Garrys Mod so I search for it and click purchase.

It then presents you with a Got Steam? popup:

With that window selected press Ctrl+U to view the source, you’re looking for a section like this:

class="gotSteam_yes" onmouseover="this.className='gotSteam_yes_ovr';"
onmouseout="this.className='gotSteam_yes';"
onclick="opener.location.href='steam://purchase/218'; window.close();"
>Yes, I already have
Steam installed!

The important bit is the onclick section.

Copy the bit between the ” ’s ” so for my game, Garrys Mod, its:

steam://purchase/218

This is a trigger for steam to navigate to the purchase game section.

Now we know where to get the game, we can instruct Internet Explorer in Wine to open it, the command for my setup is:

env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine wine "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" steam://purchase/218

This will then trigger Steam to load and prompt you with the purchase section.

Job done. Its a bit of a pain, but how often do you buy games really?

Here is something to ponder, do Windows users claim that Windows Vistas effects are a waste of time because they have already been done, and done better on other systems such as Mac OSX and Linux?

If Windows Vista was the ONLY OS that had those special effects, I bet the Windows user camp would be shouting from the rooftops about them.

Well, this was on TV last night, I wasn’t exactly eager to watch it, I’ll be honest. So, I sat down and watched about 20 minutes – 40 minutes of it before I had to stop. I know lots of people out there will like it, but to me, it just felt like a long drawn out explanation to a joke.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Peter Kay, I think he’s great. I just think that to do a program which basically highlights all of the things we already know are funny in reality TV shows and turns them into jokes felt like a dumbing down.

I don’t need someone to make a two hour program about something that I laugh at on the real programs. Its the equivalent of someone telling a joke, then Peter Kay coming over and saying, “no, do you get it, there’s this man, and he knocks on the door, then the person in the house asks who is it, and the man says Doctor, then the person in the house says Doctor Who!? and the man says, Yes, that’s right”.

Come on Peter, some of us are intelligent. I also gather that this has been a spring board for potentially a Christmas number one, as the song is going to be released (right?).

Sorry, but I have to give it 3 out of 10, got bored very quickly.

MSI Wind laptops have more returned running Linux then Windows…

Well, according to their U.S. Director of Sales Andy Tung he is saying that there are upto 4 times more MSI winds returned that are running Linux then the equivalent Windows XP version.

His suspicions are that:

“People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store.”

What I would like to know is what this is based on, I doubt all of these people return the laptop and get the same but Windows XP version. I suspect that some of them don’t go for an MSI offering at all, and maybe they opt for an ASUS EeePC, who knows but without more information we will never know. It’s a very bad statistic to release without backing it up with other information.

I used the telnetd running on the Elonex Onet to grab some more information from it, its not much at the moment but its all I could get at the time.

Next time I have access to the Elonex Onet+ I’ll let you know, its leant out to a friend of my girlfriends at the moment.

Heres what I got:

Elonex Onet+ Info

$uname -a
Linux (none) 2.4.20-celf3 #1 2008 08 18 17:51:52 HKT mips unknown

/proc $ cat cpuinfo
system type : JzRISC
processor : 0
cpu model : V4.15
BogoMIPS : 335.05
wait instruction : yes
microsecond timers : yes
tlb_entries : 32
extra interrupt vector : yes
hardware watchpoint : yes
VCED exceptions : not available
VCEI exceptions : not available

I’ve just downloaded and done a quick try out of Fedora 10. Its a Beta, so I wasn’t expecting much from it, however, for a Beta, it hangs together pretty well. I’m really looking forward to when it is released.

At the moment I’m running Fedora 8 and my upgrade path is going to be to Fedora 10.

You can download Fedora 10 for yourselves from these locations:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease
List of Mirrors
Sources I used (UK based servers)
F10-Beta-i686-Live.iso
Fedora-10-Beta-i386-netinst.iso

Now the Live iso above is what I’ve used in the following videos to install from, but the netinstall iso is only 130MB so if you want to do an install and you have a fairly fast internet connection, I’d grab that and install from it.

See videos for preview of basic features in Fedora 10, sorry about the poor quality: